Overview

Close-proximity human-robot collaboration (HRC) has the potential to help address pressing societal needs including flexible manufacturing, construction, logistics, and home care. In this workshop, we aim to promote and characterize close-proximity HRC as a new field of research, which we define as an interaction in which the human and the robot are co-located in space and time and continuously share large portions of their operational space. Modern robots lack the necessary capabilities (i.e., sensing, perception, control, and intelligence) to operate in close proximity with people, and there exists a technological barrier that prevents researchers in HRC from advancing the state-of-the-art. We argue that close-proximity HRC is i) an under-explored area of research, ii) key to the emergence of complex, rich, and flexible human-robot collaboration, and iii) an enabling technology for robots to respond to the pressing societal needs (COVID-19 pandemic among others) of modern society.

With this workshop, we aim at identifying the research needs to advance knowledge in the field, and in particular: a) understanding human-human and human-robot collaboration in conditions of task needs and space constraints; b) identifying novel capabilities needed for robots to safely and effectively operate in close proximity with people; c) bringing together the modeling of a) and the technology of b) to tackle HRC problems that revolve around realistic interactions that were not possible before. This workshop (hopefully, the first of many) is both timely and forward-looking in that it will identify current bottlenecks and propose future directions of work.

What do we aim to accomplish during this workshop?

In this workshop, we will discuss state-of-the-art approaches in close-proximity human-robot collaboration, with topics spanning from sensing and control to application areas. We aim to promote discussion and assemble researchers in this domain to foster collaboration and develop new opportunities in the field.